


I Used to Live Here

by nimblermortal



Series: Harry Potter/Mountain Goats Songfic [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, The Mountain Goats (Band)
Genre: Breaking and Entering, Gen, Introspection, Not Pottermore Compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-22
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2020-01-23 17:19:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18554293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimblermortal/pseuds/nimblermortal
Summary: A Harry Potter fic, written expressly for the Mountain Goats song “Genesis 3 23”-----The paint was chipping on number four, Privet Drive. The roof needed retiling and someone had left an old bicycle in the front lawn; no one was home to move it, though the signs said they didn’t care. Harry stood at the corner and rolled his wand in his fingertips, looking down the row of neat little ticky-tacky houses and thinking how much times had changed.





	I Used to Live Here

The paint was chipping on number four, Privet Drive. The roof needed retiling and someone had left an old bicycle in the front lawn; no one was home to move it, though the signs said they didn’t care. Harry stood at the corner and rolled his wand in his fingertips, looking down the row of neat little ticky-tacky houses and thinking how much times had changed.

He walked past the hedge he had once tended, which was still taller than he was, and across a lawn on which dandelions had been permitted to grow. Stepped between the wheels of that rusty bicycle and up the steps to knock on the door. No one answered; he hadn’t expected them to. Or he hadn’t, but he had also expected to see a lemon-pursed mouth reaching toward him from one of the windows.

He shook it off and leaned toward the door. “Alohomora,” he whispered, and felt the shift in the door as the bolt gave. And then, very deliberately, he sheathed his wand. He wasn’t an Auror anymore, and he didn’t enter houses wand out, even when the air from their doorways made his hair stand on end.

No one had been checking the set of the door on its hinges, and when it stuck he felt a flash of guilt; and then he pushed the door open, and stepped into a hallway that was smaller and dingier than he remembered, with a scattering of children’s shoes by the door.

He didn’t mean to, but he counted the sizes of the shoes, and remembered the number.

The kitchen was also smaller than he remembered - everything was smaller, and he could see the top of the refrigerator flat-footed. The breakfast table was longer, made for more and heavier use, and the door to the dining room was closed. There was a dirty pan on the stove and a heavy smell in the air; someone had been frying bacon. He ran his fingers across the grease on the handle, rubbed the stickiness between them, remembered licking that grease from his fingers as if that would make Dudley’s leftovers last longer. And remembered Dudley at fourteen, squalling the first time Harry made bacon, the only time he made it when Dudley couldn’t have any, a full plate of bacon at his fingertips while Dudley watched ravenously. He remembered the power and the revulsion, and he wished he had pushed the plate to Dudley; but he had eaten it all.

He had been fourteen, and hungry. And so had Dudley.

His hand traced over his left breast for a moment, feeling the crinkle there; and fell away again. He opened the door to the dining room, and found an extra bedroom.

Well of course. Whoever lived here now had the right to remodel their own home; but the dysphoria sent him reeling back away from the bedroom. As well, he consoled himself; he wasn’t here to pry. That was Aunt Petunia’s job.

He turned to cross back to the hallway, and smacked into the corner of the table, scoring pain up his thigh and prompting a self-mocking laugh from a man who had lost all of his Auror training and none of the habits that came from a familiar space.

Back in the hallway, and he caught his eyes skating across the walls, over photos arranged artistically - Ginny had done the same thing to their hallway, almost the same staggering, pictures of happy Potters growing year by year, step by step. But even when they were boys, Number Four Privet Drive had never had pictures in the hallway; that was déclassé, said Petunia, pronouncing it carefully.

He went to the living room to hunt for his remembered photos, found himself walking on the far side of the hallway, away from the stairs. His breathing came uneasily, and he forced himself to deeper breaths, to walk down the center of the hall. Strange, how he had never been this tense from merely walking down the hall when he had lived here; but he couldn’t bring himself to so much as touch the handle of the cupboard under the stairs.

It was so few steps to the living room; how had anyone ever thought they could fit a child in that cupboard?

The elegant armchairs had been replaced by a squashy sofa, the sort he would have associated with Professor Slughorn or the Weasleys’ camping gear. The room was a mess, with toys everywhere and the clear markers of feet running and leaping across the sofas. Harry turned right back around, unable to face that room either. There were tears pricking at his eyes, and it was not just fear this time; this time his chest was tight, and his vision blurred as he climbed the stairs. Only a little time here; only a moment.

He had to duck his head under a jut of ceiling that he had never thought about before; and there was a crackle in his pocket as he did so. But he marched on.

The three bedrooms were all inhabited, all clearly matched to the parents or the child who occupied them, to the shoes lined up downstairs. The bedstand in the master bedroom was crowded with paperback novels and the blankets were lumped in the middle, and Harry didn’t need to see any more than that. He trooped back down the stairs, then paused half way down the first flight; his foot tapped at the step and wondered, wondered what it had felt like to run down those steps and jump just here.

The silence was eviscerated by the garage door opening and Harry started, spun to get eyesight of the door, and cast, “Colloportus!” in a tight, low voice; and then he Apparated away. Stumbled back in Hogsmeade as he caught himself against the forming bruise on his hip.

The shadows were growing here, and he stopped by the little shop on the corner that Rosmerta, Madam no more, ran now that she had sold the Three Broomsticks. He took the flask up the long path to Hogwarts, his stride long as he walked down the path, back on familiar ground. His feet knew these stones. He knew Privet Drive, too; so why had that been difficult, just being in that house? Why had a dusty footprint drawn his tears?

By the time he made it back to the castle, dusk had set in, and it was growing chilly; small problem for a grown wizard. The gargoyle in the cast iron gate cackled the first half of a riddle at him.

“Potatoes,” said Harry. “You really need a new riddle.”

He could see the Quidditch pitch across the grounds, overgrown with summer, not that anyone needed the grass cut smooth. He thought, for a moment, about abandoning his plans and going flying, taking the aging school Quidditch balls out for a summer exercise; but he turned back toward the school. The greens made him think of dandelions thrusting discordantly through lands Harry had once so carefully tended.

_I came from there,_ he thought, _but this is where I grew._

Professor Sprout was bent over her plots, though these days she was bent regardless of the work in her hands; they raised hands to each other as he passed, but she turned back to the beds she was turning, and Harry’s path lay upwards. He passed through the huge front door and climbed the stairs absentmindedly, not hesitating when they changed paths. He took the open ways to the Astronomy Tower, no secret passages, and waved absentmindedly at the paintings he passed as they greeted him.

He made one sidetrack: he went to the Gryffindor common room. The Fat Lady asked him for the password, which was always “Ridcully” in summer. The stairs to the boys’ dormitory were the same length as he remembered; the four-poster beds still as lushly curtained, still smelling faintly of boys and home. He found himself in the fourth year dormitory, smiling at the bed that had been Ron’s, even all these years later when so many other boys had lived here. Even when he knew where to show up to find Ron and admire his and Hermione’s children; but when they were children, Ron had been his. They had thought they knew every thought in the other’s mind.

There was the window where he had watched Hedwig flit toward the owlery; and there the space where he kept his trunk. It was so little - little space to call his own, little things to call his own. And yet those little things made home, and still did, when the room was empty and smelled of undisturbed dust.

He left again, ran a finger along the sofa in the common room on his way out, where Hermione had chastised them for trading chocolate frog cards instead of finishing their homework, where Fred and George had reined over trivia or the dispensation of their latest inventions. But the page in his pocket was heavier than any assignment Hermione had harassed him over, and he turned away again. The back of the portrait looked the same as ever, and the steps upward were familiar.

It was nearly dark by the time he reached the top of the Astronomy Tower, full dark by the time he had transfigured a bench into a fire pit and gotten himself settled. He pulled out the firewhisky, and looked up at the stars, and took a pull.

He’d spent a lot of long, cold nights at the top of this tower, but few so comfortable as this. Summer at Hogwarts, looking out over his kingdom, all his when the students wouldn’t be back for weeks. His to welcome them into; his to search for children who didn’t trust adults to handle problems for them, who flinched when he did.

He’d been so happy here as a child; he wanted that for them. And Hogwarts needed him; needed someone who wouldn’t overlook those children, and who wouldn’t let any of them grow up thinking he was solely responsible for paralysis, forbidden chambers, Occlumency, and Horcruxes. If he were Dumbledore, Harry knew, he would not have been able to do it; and yet, because of that, that imagined child raised for the slaughter would never have come to sit on the Astronomy Tower, drinking firewhisky and thinking himself the king of the castle.

How had he been so happy when he was so doomed?

He took another pull of firewhisky, and heard the paper in his pocket crinkle one more time. He pulled it out this time, read it again in the light of conjured fire.

_Harry. Something’s wrong with little Rose. I think you can help. I’d like you to._

_I don’t want anyone in my family to feel a waste of space. Duds._

Harry sighed deeply, and put the paper in the fire. He took another draught of firewhisky. The stones of the castle were grey and unhelpful, and the stars were cold. He rubbed a free hand down his face, crossing the lightning bolt scar with the one on his wrist from when he’d cut his hand trimming the hedge. He’d learned not every problem was his to solve.

There was a wand in his pocket, and a parchment in his office addressed to Dudley in cold ink. Here and now, there was a fire, a tower, and no one to interrupt him but the stars.

**Author's Note:**

> Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. - Genesis 3:23


End file.
